Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Lin Zhao, Janet Wang, Xinru Jiang, Yanshu Li, Chenrui Ma, Pan Wang 等 10 位作者
Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) can segment objects from text prompts and track them across video, but its memory and computation costs make deployment difficult. Post-training quantization (PTQ) reduces these costs by using fewer bits. However, a quantized model can select the wrong object or lose track of its target across frames. We call this prompt-alignment drift. Controlled tests show that perturbing low-variance feature directions strongly affects target selection. We propose Semantics-Preserving Quantization (SPQ), which gives more calibration weight to concept-sensitive parameters, preserves residual features, and corrects the mean error in video memory. Fixed text concepts guide calibration without task annotations. All three components operate offline and add no inference operators. With a W4A8 image encoder, SPQ improves RefCOCO Pr@0.5 from 42.1 to 72.5 over PTQ4SAM while retaining 54.8 COCO mask AP. Experiments on LVIS, RefCOCO variants, and SA-V show consistent gains. A CLIP study also shows improved image-text retrieval.
Coding agents must deliver correct software while respecting users' expertise, preferences, and working conditions. Existing benchmarks increasingly incorporate interaction, yet personalized requirement fulfillment remains underexplored. We introduce PersonaCodeBench, which turns user characteristics into verifiable obligations in persona-driven multi-turn coding sessions. Our persona pool spans roles, technical abilities, interaction preferences, and practical constraints, yielding task-grounded evolved requirements for implementation, permissions, testing, explanation, and delivery. At runtime, a controller governs user simulator responses and requirement disclosure, using online requirement evaluation to provide feedback and advance the interaction. Requirements emerge progressively, with their content, disclosure conditions, and acceptance criteria fixed before evaluation. A completion verifier and a personalization verifier separately assess native correctness and persona fulfillment. Joint pass requires both adherence to the declared budget and compliance with validity conditions. We evaluate all major frontier agents, establish a comprehensive leaderboard, and conduct detailed experimental analyses to validate effectiveness. PersonaCodeBench supports reproducible evaluation of coding agents' ability to meet explicit, personalized user expectations alongside coding objectives.
Clustering faces by identity in long, continuous video streams is a challenging task that serves as a building block for human-centric video analysis. The majority of existing face clustering models are offline, i.e., they assume the entire data to be available altogether. In many practical scenarios, however, the entire data is either unavailable or poses computational challenges to be processed in its entirety. A handful of online methods that exist rely on geometric visual features and simple thresholding techniques, which fail when the faces exhibit significant appearance variations in long, unconstrained videos. To this end, we present VISTA, the first vision language framework for online face clustering in long videos. VISTA leverages semantic reasoning in a controlled, uncertainty aware fashion to maintain both high cluster purity and long range identity continuity. This makes it robust to the variations in illumination, pose, and costume changes that the faces and characters exhibit in long real world videos. Extensive experiments on the VPCD benchmark dataset (with 15 full episodes from The Big Bang Theory [2007-2019], Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997-2003], and Sherlock [2010-2017]) demonstrate that VISTA achieves a robust precision and recall balance, consistently improving over the strongest matched online unsupervised baseline (COFC) under identical detector, embeddings, and evaluation protocol. Code and supplementary material: https://github.com/SkyJiashu/VISTA.
Ting-Hsiang Hsu, Bai-Hong Zhou, Qibin Liu, Yue Xu, Shu Li, George Wei-Shu Hou, Benjamin Nachman, Shih-Chieh Hsu 等 11 位作者
Data-intensive collider experiments increasingly require models that transfer across high-dimensional, partially observed measurements, yet most analyses still optimize separate models for each task. Here, to address this bottleneck, we introduce EVENET, an event-level foundation model pretrained on 500 million simulated collision events using self-supervised learning and physics-informed supervision. The model constructs a shared particle-cloud representation from the variable-length set of physics objects in each event. Across searches for heavy resonances and exotic Higgs decays, EVENET outperforms both established and state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in low-statistics regimes. We validate transfer to experimental data by rediscovering the $Υ$ meson in CMS Open Data. The pretrained model also supports precise extraction of quantum-correlation observables that remain stable under the tested systematic variations. Together, these results establish a reusable backbone for diverse collider analyses, improving downstream adaptation after a substantial one-time pretraining investment.
The age of information (AoI) has become a central measure of data freshness in modern wireless systems. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to AoI optimization, enabling adaptive decision-making in dynamic and stochastic wireless environments without requiring precise system models. Yet existing surveys either focus on classical AoI formulations or provide broad discussions of RL in wireless networks without addressing freshness as a unified learning problem. Motivated by this gap, this survey examines RL specifically through the lens of AoI and generalized freshness optimization. Motivated by this gap, this survey examines RL specifically through the lens of AoI and generalized freshness optimization. We organize AoI and its variants into native, function-based, and application-oriented families, providing a clearer view of how freshness should be modeled in B5G and 6G systems. Building on this foundation, we introduce a policy-centric taxonomy that reflects the decisions most relevant to freshness, consisting of update-control RL, medium-access RL, risk-sensitive RL, and multi-agent RL. This structure provides a coherent framework for understanding how learning can support important wireless networking problems, including sampling, scheduling, UAV trajectory planning, medium access, and distributed coordination. We further synthesize recent progress in RL-driven freshness control and highlight open challenges. The goal is to establish a unified foundation for learning-based freshness optimization in next-generation wireless networks.
Yingshu Li, Shaoyang Zhou, Zhanyu Wang, Yunyi Liu, Xinyu Liang, Xi Zhang, Lingqiao Liu, Lei Wang 等 9 位作者
Clinical evidence is inherently relational: medical images are interpreted with prior studies, cross-modal examinations, reports, and localized findings, and retrieving relevant evidence is therefore central to clinical interpretation. Recent foundation models increasingly encode these heterogeneous sources into shared embedding spaces, yet existing embedding evaluation often focuses on isolated matches, leaving unclear whether current models retrieve relevant evidence across changes in modality, appearance, and granularity. We introduce MedHEB, a unified benchmark with 107 retrieval tasks from 54 datasets, including both in-distribution and held-out-source evaluation, across three axes: evidence form (2D images, 3D volumes, text), pairing type (image--image, image--text, text--text, and modality-bridging visual matching), and relevance granularity (global, question-conditioned, region-level). Under a single ranking protocol, MedHEB varies clinically relevant evidence definitions to test whether embedding proximity remains meaningful across heterogeneous evidence, including modality-bridging visual retrieval and region-level text-to-region retrieval. Across representative models, performance is uneven across retrieval families: models strong on conventional image--text or text--text retrieval are less reliable on modality-bridging and region-level tasks. Current embedding spaces capture some clinical relationships well but do not yet provide balanced retrieval across heterogeneous evidence. We further provide MedEmb, an MLLM-based reference embedding model trained on the MedHEB ID split, as a reproducible baseline for unified 2D--3D--text medical retrieval. We release MedHEB with preprocessing scripts, evaluation code, access manifests, and MedEmb to support research on clinically meaningful medical embeddings.
OPSD provides dense supervision for agentic reinforcement learning through privileged information feedback. However, existing privileged information often lacks explicit task-progression planning, while teacher-student log-probability gaps reflect shifts in model preference rather than true task progress. To address these limitations, we propose Subgoal-Guided Graph-Regularized OPSD (SGR-OPSD), a framework that combines subgoal supervision with interaction-derived evidence for turn-level credit assignment. Specifically, SGR-OPSD uses LLM-generated subgoal plans to provide dense action-level guidance, converting them into advantage weights via a constrained, KL-regularized objective. To ground credit in observed outcomes, we construct a Subgoal Progress Graph that estimates empirical returns from sampled transition frequencies. The graph compares empirical action returns against the state average to derive preferences that calibrate the teacher's credit weights. Evaluated on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-QA across two model scales (Qwen2.5-3B and 7B), SGR-OPSD consistently outperforms GRPO and strong self-distillation baselines, improving success rates over GRPO by up to 7.4 percentage points and reaching 85.8% on ALFWorld with Qwen2.5-7B. Ablation studies confirm that subgoal guidance and graph-based weight calibration are key to these performance gains.
Siyang Wu, Weizhi Zhang, Chen Yang, Esther Xu Fei, Jorin Overwiening, Xu Pan, Jing Tang, Yixuan He 等 37 位作者
Scientific agents collaborate with researchers whose expertise and preferences differ, but benchmarks usually hold the collaborator fixed. We introduce PersonaScienceBench: 200 tasks from five benchmarks across four scientific domains. Simulated researchers provide context and feedback according to persona profiles, while task objectives and grading remain fixed. Agents encounter researcher preferences only through conversation. Across eighteen modelconfigurations, task performance, fact recovery, and self-repetition reveal different strengths. Detailed GPT 6 Astra analyses show distinct agent responses across researcher profiles; interaction traces illustrate targeted clar ification and workflow revision. These behaviors can differ even when final scores match. PersonaScienceBench therefore evaluates how agents collaborate with diverse researchers alongside whether they complete the task.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is increasingly explored as an input representation for 3D perception. Yet it remains unclear how current 3D architectures exploit heterogeneous Gaussian attributes. This ambiguity makes accuracy hard to interpret and limits principled architecture design for 3DGS perception. However, existing object-level 3DGS datasets lack the appearance variation or artifact control needed for systematic attribute-level analysis. We introduce COGS, a large-scale 3DGS dataset with 15,675 artifact-filtered and appearance-rich objects across 40 categories. Built on COGS, we establish COGS-Bench for object classification and attribute-usage diagnosis, complemented by external validation. Our benchmark shows that Gaussian attributes are not uniformly beneficial: selected subsets can outperform the full attribute set, and the effects of appearance, opacity, and covariance-related attribute combinations vary substantially across architectures. We further study this finding with HALO, a reference model that preserves attribute-specific evidence before hierarchical aggregation. Experiments on COGS-Bench and external 3DGS datasets demonstrate that COGS supports systematic diagnosis of 3DGS attribute usage, while HALO highlights the value of role-preserving attribute organization. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/XiaoZhengCV/COGS.
Jing Huang, Zhiya Tan, Changtao Miao, Shutao Gong, Yang Wang, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Jianshu Li, Ying Yan
Multilingual multi-hop document question answering (MMHop-DocQA) requires locating and integrating evidence across complex layouts, document pages, and diverse languages. Existing approaches include single-pass processing and adaptive tool use, but learning to coordinate evidence acquisition, cross-page integration, and answer verification remains challenging. To address this challenge, we present DocSkill, an agentic framework with a learned skill-orchestration policy for adaptive evidence acquisition and reasoning. The policy selects, revisits, or skips skills according to the evolving evidence state. To construct supervision for skill orchestration, bounded Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) explores alternative skill trajectories offline. These trajectories provide demonstrations for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference pairs for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We further introduce MMHop-DocBench, a multilingual multi-hop document QA dataset with training and test splits, containing 60K QA pairs across 10 languages and eight document domains. Its HopGen pipeline builds hierarchical page-element graphs to derive traceable cross-page evidence paths and generate grounded QA pairs with page- and element-level evidence annotations. Experiments show that DocSkill with Qwen3-VL-8B achieves 41.0 accuracy and 49.2 F1 on MMHop-DocBench, exceeding the strongest evaluated baseline by 5.5 and 6.3 points, respectively, and achieving competitive performance on MMLongBench-Doc and DocBench.
Knowing when they are reliable is essential for language models to support human-AI collaboration. Yet interaction feedback is not always complete or correct, and may mislead models' understanding of their own capabilities. We introduce LADDER to study how language models assess themselves under unreliable feedback. Our findings show that models can accurately report supplied performance information while still struggling to form trustworthy self-assessments from interaction experience. Apparently accurate assessments can obscure capability differences and do not necessarily predict future task performance. These findings suggest that trustworthy self-assessment should be evaluated against observed task performance and its predictive value. Our study provides empirical evidence of the limits of model self-knowledge and a basis for evaluating capability awareness in reliable human-AI collaboration.
Computer-use agents (CUAs) are commonly evaluated against fixed task specifications, but users may omit requirements, add constraints, or require approval before consequential actions. Completing the benchmark instruction does not guarantee serving the person who asked. We introduce PersonaCUABench, which holds 74 tasks across 11 domains fixed and varies only who asks. A persona agent, playing one of 44 personas in four groups, rewrites each instruction in that user's own words and answers the CUA's questions, while the CUA sees only the dialogue, never the profile or the original instruction. Across nine backbones (3,330 runs), mean task completion falls by 36% relative to the original requests. The losses have two sources: in 59.9% of cells that lose points, the agent engages with what the user asked for and still gets it wrong, and 11.2% are stops the user requested that the checker scores as failures. Even when a persona request is fully completed, the user gives the top satisfaction rating in only 62.7% of cells, against 84.1% for the original requests. CUAs should therefore be evaluated not only on task completion but also on whether they meet the requirements and constraints users express. Code: https://github.com/MatrAIx-ai/PersonaCUABench. Project page: https://matraix.ai/research/persona-cua.html
Weihai Lu Peking University, Zhejun Zhao Baidu, Yanshu Li, Huan He Amazon
Multimodal Stance Detection (MSD) is crucial for understanding public discourse, yet effectively fusing text and image, especially with conflicting signals, remains challenging. Existing methods often face difficulties with contextual grounding, cross-modal interpretation ambiguity, and single-pass reasoning fragility. To address these, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Multi-modal Multi-agent Stance Detection (MM-StanceDet), a novel multi-agent framework integrating Retrieval Augmentation for contextual grounding, specialized Multimodal Analysis agents for nuanced interpretation, a Reasoning-Enhanced Debate stage for exploring perspectives, and Self-Reflection for robust adjudication. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate MM-StanceDet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating the efficacy of its multi-agent architecture and structured reasoning stages in addressing complex multimodal stance challenges.
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cs.CL · cs.MA · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xi Xiao University of Alabama at Birmingham, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang Tulane University, Chen Liu Yale University, Zhuxuanzi Wang Cornell University, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao Northeastern University, Guosheng Hu University of Bristol 等 10 位作者
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a cornerstone of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). Yet, its efficacy is hampered by two fundamental limitations: \textit{semantic drift}, arising from treating all update directions with equal importance, and \textit{structural incoherence}, due to adapting layers independently, resulting in uncoordinated and suboptimal updates. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{StructLoRA}, a framework that tackles both limitations through a principled dual-component design: (1) an Information Bottleneck-guided filter that prunes task-irrelevant directions to mitigate semantic drift, and (2) a lightweight, training-only graph-based coordinator that enforces inter-layer consistency to resolve structural incoherence. Extensive experiments across large language models, vision language models, and vision models (including LLaMA, LLaVA, and ViT) demonstrate that \textbf{StructLoRA} consistently establishes a new state of the art, outperforming not only vanilla LoRA but also advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. Notably, the gains are particularly pronounced in challenging low-rank and low-data regimes. Crucially, since the proposed modules operate only during training, \textbf{StructLoRA} improves performance with \textbf{zero additional inference cost}, shifting the focus of PEFT from mere parameter compression to a more holistic optimization of information quality and structural integrity.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
The Time is Here for Just-in-Time Systems: Challenges and Opportunities
Shu Liu, Alexander Krentsel, Shubham Agarwal, Mert Cemri, Ziming Mao, Soujanya Ponnapalli, Alexandros G. Dimakis, Sylvia Ratnasamy 等 11 位作者
AI 速览：作者提出用基于LLM的编码智能体按规格即时合成专用系统（Just-in-Time Systems），并以Jitskit合成键值存储为例，报告其在18个规格上均优于现成基线。
Core systems like key-value stores have historically taken years to build, and are designed to be general so as to amortize cost across deployments, paying a significant performance cost. We argue that LLM-based coding agents now make a different approach tractable: Just-in-Time Systems, in which the entire system is synthesized from scratch, specialized to the environment, workload, and required system properties. We present a JIT system synthesis pipeline, Jitskit, and explore its effectiveness in synthesizing key-value stores from spec cards that span different YCSB workloads, deployment constraints (e.g., compute resources), and system properties (e.g., consistency and durability). Jitskit iteratively refines a system implementation to match the specification against an evolving evaluation test suite. The resulting synthesized systems are performant, beating comparable state-of-the-art systems on 18 of 18 specs tried, by up to 4.6x over the best off-the-shelf baseline on the most favorable spec. Naively running Claude Code either reward-hacks or underperforms Jitskit by up to 5.4x. We discuss the challenges we overcame in building Jitskit and our key takeaways.
Inductive Deductive Synthesis: Enabling AI to Generate Formally Verified Systems
Shubham Agarwal, Alexander Krentsel, Shu Liu, Mert Cemri, Audrey Cheng, Rui Meng, Tomas Pfister, Chun-Liang Li 等 13 位作者
AI 速览：提出归纳演绎合成（IDS）智能体系统，联合增量地合成实现与证明，从失败中学习策略，为分布式系统生成形式化验证的代码。
AI agents increasingly excel at generating, testing, and refining code. However, they fall short on tasks requiring formal guarantees of full coverage that testing alone cannot provide. Distributed systems are a prime example: properties such as consistency between reads and writes must hold under every possible interleaving of events. Mechanized formal verification can guarantee such correctness, but typically demands months to years of expert effort. As evidence, even SOTA coding agents (Codex with GPT-5.4 and Claude Code with Opus 4.6) succeed on only 2/7 distributed key-value-store specifications. In this paper, we present the first effective approach to addressing this gap, Inductive Deductive Synthesis (IDS), which jointly and incrementally synthesizes implementation and proof, and learns from failed attempts to systematically try promising strategies. Built as an agentic LLM system, IDS achieves 7/7 in about 6.8 hours and $106 per spec on average, roughly 200x faster than expert effort and 17% cheaper than SOTA agents. IDS further incorporates performance feedback into the same loop, yielding implementations up to 3x faster than published verified systems.
Supporting Our AI Overlords: Redesigning Data Systems to be Agent-First
Shu Liu, Soujanya Ponnapalli, Shreya Shankar, Sepanta Zeighami, Alan Zhu, Shubham Agarwal, Ruiqi Chen, Samion Suwito 等 15 位作者
AI 速览：作者主张未来数据系统应以LLM智能体为主要工作负载，并基于智能体推测过程的特征提出智能体优先的数据系统架构研究方向。
Large Language Model (LLM) agents, acting on their users' behalf to manipulate and analyze data, are likely to become the dominant workload for data systems in the future. When working with data, agents employ a high-throughput process of exploration and solution formulation for the given task, one we call agentic speculation. The sheer volume and inefficiencies of agentic speculation can pose challenges for present-day data systems. We argue that data systems need to adapt to more natively support agentic workloads. We take advantage of the characteristics of agentic speculation that we identify, i.e., scale, heterogeneity, redundancy, and steerability - to outline a number of new research opportunities for a new agent-first data systems architecture, ranging from new query interfaces, to new query processing techniques, to new agentic memory stores.
Audrey Cheng, Shu Liu, Melissa Pan, Zhifei Li, Bowen Wang, Alex Krentsel, Tian Xia, Mert Cemri 等 17 位作者
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is starting to transform the research process as we know it by automating the discovery of new solutions. Given a task, the typical AI-driven approach is (i) to generate a set of diverse solutions, and then (ii) to verify these solutions and select one that solves the problem. Crucially, this approach assumes the existence of a reliable verifier, i.e., one that can accurately determine whether a solution solves the given problem. We argue that systems research, long focused on designing and evaluating new performance-oriented algorithms, is particularly well-suited for AI-driven solution discovery. This is because system performance problems naturally admit reliable verifiers: solutions are typically implemented in real systems or simulators, and verification reduces to running these software artifacts against predefined workloads and measuring performance. We term this approach as AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS), which iteratively generates, evaluates, and refines solutions. Using penEvolve, an existing open-source ADRS instance, we present case studies across diverse domains, including load balancing for multi-region cloud scheduling, Mixture-of-Experts inference, LLM-based SQL queries, and transaction scheduling. In multiple instances, ADRS discovers algorithms that outperform state-of-the-art human designs (e.g., achieving up to 5.0x runtime improvements or 50% cost reductions). We distill best practices for guiding algorithm evolution, from prompt design to evaluator construction, for existing frameworks. We then discuss the broader implications for the systems community: as AI assumes a central role in algorithm design, we argue that human researchers will increasingly focus on problem formulation and strategic guidance. Our results highlight both the disruptive potential and the urgent need to adapt systems research practices in the age of AI.
Shu Liu, Asim Biswal, Amog Kamsetty, Audrey Cheng, Luis Gaspar Schroeder, Liana Patel, Shiyi Cao, Xiangxi Mo 等 11 位作者
Batch data analytics is a growing application for Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs enable users to perform a wide range of natural language tasks, such as classification, entity extraction, and translation, over large datasets. However, LLM inference is highly costly and slow: for example, an NVIDIA L4 GPU running Llama3-8B can only process 6 KB of text per second, taking about a day to handle 15 GB of data; processing a similar amount of data costs around $10K on OpenAI's GPT-4o. In this paper, we propose novel techniques that can significantly reduce the cost of LLM calls for relational data analytics workloads. Our key contribution is developing efficient algorithms for reordering the rows and the fields within each row of an input table to maximize key-value (KV) cache reuse when performing LLM serving. As such, our approach can be easily applied to existing analytics systems and serving platforms. Our evaluation shows that our solution can yield up to 3.4x improvement in job completion time on a benchmark of diverse LLM-based queries using Llama 3 models. Our solution also achieves a 32% cost savings under OpenAI and Anthropic pricing models.